Collocating Peace

What is peace? How do we experience and interpret it? How true the proverb is: if you want peace, you must prepare for war? In addition, what are its cognitive, socio-cultural and linguistic implications? How deeply are we culturally and linguistically imbued in, or conditioned by, metaphors in our interpretation of peace? This investigation focuses on some representative noun+noun sequences in referring to peace, from a socio-linguistic perspective and a critical linguistic approach. As Biber (2002) explains, “noun+noun sequences contain only content words that present information densely and are used to express a bewildering array of logical relations with implicit meaning that the reader must infer from the intended logical relationship”. The intended logical relationships represent the conceptual interpretation of cognitively meaningful content words, which, in the end, become the established and consolidated lexical patterns of people‟s common sense, social practice and ideology: the ideology of war.